Tom Perkins apologizes for ‘Kristallnacht’

Billionaire venture capitalist Tom Perkins apologized for using the word “Kristallnacht” in a letter to the editor, comparing persecution of the wealthiest Americans to Nazi Germany, but he defended the analogy in saying the 1 percent is “threatened.”

In a Monday interview with Bloomberg TV, the co-founder of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers said he apologized to the Anti-Defamation League personally for the piece in The Wall Street Journal, in which he said, “I would call attention to the parallels of fascist Nazi Germany to its war on its ‘one percent,’ namely its Jews, to the progressive war on the American one percent, namely the ‘rich.’”

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“I talked to the head of the Anti-Defamation League Abe Foxman this morning following up on a letter I had sent over the weekend apologizing for the use of the word Kirstallnacht,” Perkins said Monday. “It was a terrible word to have chosen. I, like many, have tried to understand the 20th century and the incomprehensible evil of the Holocaust. It can’t be explained. Even to try to explain is questionable, it’s wrong, it’s evil.”

But Perkins said while he regrets using the word, he doesn’t regret the message “at all.”

Perkins explained why he made the comparison in the first place.

“I used the word because during the occupy of San Francisco by the Occupy Wall Street Crowd, they broke the windows in the Wells Fargo Bank, they marched up to our automobile strip on Van Ness Avenue and broke all the windows on all the luxury car dealerships, and I saw that, I remembered that, the police just stood by frozen, and I thought, well, this is how Kirstallnacht began, so that word was in my mind,” Perkins said.

But in reading from his letter to the ADL, he said, “I deeply apologize to you and any who have mistaken my reference to Kristallnacht as a sign of overt or latent anti-Semitism, this is not the case.”

Saying his late partner fled Austria and fought for the American forces in the war, and that he spoke out against hatred against a minority, Perkins said he believed the man would appreciate his letter.

“My point was that when you start to use hatred against a minority, it can get out of control. I think that was my thought and now that, as a messenger, I’ve been thoroughly killed by everybody, at least read the message,” Perkins said. “I don’t personally feel threatened, but I think that a very important part of America, namely the creative 1 percent, are threatened. … I think we are beginning to engage in class warfare. I think the rich as a class are threatened through higher taxes, higher regulation and so forth.”